A White House teleprompter operator will pay more than $172,000 to end a federal regulator’s probe into alleged well-timed prediction market bets about President Donald Trump’s speeches.
Gabriel Perez agreed to pay a $65,000 penalty to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and return more than $107,000 in illicit profits without admitting the financial regulator’s claims that he misappropriated inside information to rack up wins on the prediction market platform Kalshi.
The penalty represents a “substantial discount” because of Perez’s cooperation with the agency’s investigation, the CFTC said in a press release. Perez also agreed to a three-year trading ban, the CFTC said.
“As someone working at the White House, Perez understood the information that he learned during his work was confidential and not to be shared with anyone outside of the White House,” the CFTC said in its cease-and-desist order.
An attorney for Perez couldn’t immediately be reached.
Kalshi said it spotted what it described as anomalous trades in March and alerted the CFTC, Bloomberg reported in July. A White House spokesperson at the time said the employee was put on unpaid administrative leave, without naming the individual. The CFTC views prediction market platforms as derivatives exchanges under its jurisdiction.
Kalshi’s head of enforcement, Robert DeNault, said in a post on X on Friday night that the firm caught prohibited trading activity. “It doesn’t matter who you are: violate our rules or federal law and you will face the consequences,” DeNault said.
Perez allegedly made the trades between December 2025 and February 2026, making almost exclusively sports- and Trump-related wagers on Kalshi, including bets on questions like “What will Trump say during his remarks at the Detroit Economic Club?”
Perez generally had access to Trump’s speeches about an hour before they happened, the CFTC said.
The case is the latest one to ramp up concerns about the new opportunities for insider trading opened up by prediction markets.
Lawmakers have introduced legislation aimed at cracking down on some wagers while the White House has warned staff against using confidential information to place trades on the exchanges.
Platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have exploded in popularity in the past 18 months and allow users to place wagers on everything from sports to elections. So-called mention markets, which Perez used, make it possible to bet on whether high-profile figures will use certain words or phrases in speeches, earnings calls or post-game press conferences.
Both Kalshi and Polymarket have said they are opposed to insider trading and actively police the markets and send tips to law enforcement and federal regulators.
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